Paper Typography

Our brief was to make a word out of paper. We wanted to display the word in a way which showed its meaning. To start we began by researching some typographic artists who work with 3D such as Craig Ward and Rob Ryan, however, we found that Rob Ryan’s work is very intricate and also doesn’t show the meaning of the word as clearly as we wanted to show it so we decided to look on Pinterest. On Pinterest we found quite a few images which we liked as they were brightly coloured and represented the word well, from doing this research we found that we wanted to do something with water or a splash as we thought the layers of paper would work well to show depth. We then started jotting down some quick ideas for the word ‘SPILL’ (img above) which we chose as we liked the idea of putting water spilling out of a coffee cup as this could be very 3D and work well as a piece. After doing this we had a kind of idea of the way we wanted to take this forward so we practiced how we were going to make the type to make sure it was achievable, we liked the idea of making them like a net as this was quite blocky and contrasted with the flowing water. After experimenting with this we wanted to think of ideas to make it even more 3D so we had the idea to make the base water curved to look more like water, we also had the idea to make the letters different heights to emphasise this more. Once we’d put the whole piece together we were very happy with the outcome as it looked really good. 

From this task I have a new way of thinking about type as I have never made type by hand, it also took a lot of experimenting to get the letter to look 3D so now I know how to do this if I need to use it again. I would really like to make this concept into an animation, either using the actual letters made of out paper, or recreating it in Illustrator.